Re: Getting beyond the ping pong match (was RE: Cleaning House)

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

[...]

 > The purpose of the "role" attribute is addressed in HTML5 by the "class"
 > attribute, along with predefined classes.

[...]

 > I don't understand how the "role"
 > attribute does anything that "class" can't do.

Once again, I think these statements indicate the profound
differences between the beliefs of the founder WHATWG members
and of some of us who have more recently started to contribute
to this debate.

"Class", in classic HTML, has no pre-defined semantics
(or, more precisely, no value of "class" has pre-defined
semantics), and thus there is a large corpus of classic
HTML documents in the wild that use all conceivable values
of "class", /including/ those which the WHATWG seek to
reserve.

"Role", on the other hand, simply does not exist
in  classic HTML, and thus if the WHATWG were to reserve
some (and perhaps all) possible values for "role", this
could have no effect whatsoever on legacy documents.  Thus
I for one believe that if the WHATWG perceive value in
reserving some half-dozen class names, they would be
better advised to reserve some or all role names instead,
so as to avoid any possible conflict with the semantics
of extant documents.

Philip Taylor

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 10:04:14 UTC